How explain why Python is easier/nicer than Lisp which has a simpler grammar/syntax?

[2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE at potatochowder.com]

On 2020-08-06 at 16:08:29 -0700,
Christian Seberino <cseberino at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Trying to maintain that recursive list of unclosed lists in your
> > brain is fun. It stretches the brain in interesting ways. I was
> > way into Lisp at one point, including writing several Lisp
> > interpreters (that simple structure makes Lisp very easy to
> > implement). But I never found Lisp code very maintainable, because
> > any time you read a program, you have to build up that list in your
> > head every time just to follow the logic structure and figure out
> > what the return value will be. 

"[R]ecursive list of unclosed lists"?  Can you (whoever you are) expand
on that?  Yes, if you eschew helper functions and local variables, then
you can end up with depply nested code, but that's true in any language.

Because of Lisp's simple syntax, text editors can nearly completely
relieve the programmer from the tedium of indenting and formatting, and
even closing parenthesis, which also highlights missing/extra/unbalanced
parentheses pretty quickly.

> So basically while recursion is easy to write it isn't so easy for other
> people to understand compared to iterative code.  So maybe that is a
> big part of it....recursion is just harder on the brain than iteration.

I don't know about that.  Have you ever seen an iterative or imperative
version of quicksort (or any divide-and-conquer algorithm, for that
matter)?  Yes, it's doable, but explicitly managing your own stack of
unsorted data ranges can really obscure the idea(s) of quicksort.

And it's hard to imagine any language being more straightforward than
Haskell's recursive factorial function:

    factorial 0 = 1
    factorial n = n * factorial (n - 1)

(Yes, it fails for n < 0, but that's outside the scope of whether or not
recursion is harder on the brain than iteration.  Pattern matching is a
beautiful thing, too.)